18. While teaching at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in summer 2010, I learned that students there do not study this pivotal conflict either.
19. It should be noted that many non-Muslim as well as Muslim countries such as Nepal, the United States, the United Kingdom, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—among numerous others—send officers to Pakistan’s military institutions for training. While scholars often question whether or not Pakistan Army officers deployed to the Arab Gulf states are influenced by Wahhabi teachings during their deployment, it is worth questioning whether it is Pakistan’s military training institutions that are exporting highly stylized teachings of jihad. This present research cannot inveigh upon this issue, but it is worth noting for future analysis.
20. The Battle of Badr (March 624 A.D. or Ramadan, 2 AH in the Islamist calendar) was fought by the early Muslims in the Hejaz region of contemporary Saudi Arabia. It is viewed as a decisive battle of Islam’s early years and represented an important turning point in the prophet’s ongoing rivalry with the Quraish tribe of Mecca. Given the extent to which the Muslims were outnumbered, the victory is often seen as a result of divine intervention.
Chapter 5
1. Rais (2008, 18) concedes that the notion of strategic depth “is a widely debated issue among security experts on Pakistan. It means that Afghanistan does not allow itself to become a base to powers adversarial to Pakistan—a defensive interpretation. It also means that Pakistan will have a dominant position in Afghanistan in its rivalry with other regional powers, including preventing a Kabul–New Delhi nexus.”
2. It is worth noting that the British understood South Asia and the entire Indian Ocean to make up a “single strategic region, stretching from the passes of Afghanistan through the Tibetan buffer to northern Burma and from the Red Sea to the Strait of Malacca, with India at the center” (Garver 2001, 17). Thus, like Pakistan, independent India also inherited this strategic view of South Asia and its extended environment. However, whereas in Pakistan strategic elites adopted this strategic vision with verve; in India “it withered under Nehru’s globalistic nonalignment of the 1950s” (Garver 2001, 17).
3. Persia was problematic for several reasons. Not only was it in domestic disarray, but it also had proved unable to successfully challenge Russia during Russia’s various attempts to annex territory claimed by Iran. For example, the 1804–1813 war between the Persian and Russian empires ended in the Treaty of Gulistan, under which Iran ceded parts of modern-day Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia to Russia. Second, and equally problematic for the British, Persia stilled claimed Herat and even laid siege to it several times during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—once, in 1837 and 1838, with Russian assistance. This “brought the Russians in contact with Afghanistan” (Barfield 2012, 114). Dost Mohammad was forced to call upon British assistance to repulse the Russo-Persian forces.
4. Shuja governed the Durrani Afghan state from 1803, when he ousted Shah Mahmud, to 1809, when Mahmud returned to the throne. Mahmud exiled Shuja to British India, from whence the deposed king plotted his return to power (Barfield 2010).
5. While Dost Mohammad was at first “barely able to control the region between Kabul and Ghazni, by the end of the twenty years of his second reign in 1863, he had retaken control of almost all of today’s Afghanistan” (Barfield 2012, 127).
6. The following year, the British assisted Mohammad to expel the Persians from Herat. The defeat forced the Persians to finally recognize their loss of Herat and respect Afghan borders.
7. Lord Lytton, Viceroy from 1876 to 1880, first introduced the concept of a scientific frontier and argued that the best line of defense of British India was along the northern slope of the Hindu Kush. At that time, Indian security experts were divided into proponents of the forward and the backward approaches. The forward group “advocated that the frontier should be from Kabul through Ghazni to Kandhar [sic] because unless the tribal country was occupied tribesmen would continue to give trouble; river frontier was not a frontier at all; tribal area could pay the expenses of military occupation if its mineral resources were developed; and even if the policy was expensive it must be adopted for the sake of India’s security” (Haq et al. 2005, 15) In contrast, the latter group “advocated that Indus should be the frontier line because the tribesmen were troublesome and fanatic and would not tolerate interference; it was difficult to fight in the mountains; and it was very expensive to have British Cantonments in the tribal territory” (ibid.). After some wavering between these schools, between 1888 and 1894 defense planners drew up a compromise boundary that they believed met the scientific requirements of defense. This scientific border between Afghanistan and India became known as the Durand Line (ibid.).
8. The British had in fact used this route to enter Afghanistan during the first Anglo-Afghan war. In the second half of the nineteenth century it was home to multiple kingdoms, one of the most important of which was the Khanate of Qalat (or Kingdom of Qalat), governed by the Khan of Qalat. In 1854 the British Indian government had concluded a treaty with the Khan under which he received £10,000 per year in exchange for permitting the British to station troops within his kingdom and agreeing to fight any internal or external forces threatening British interests (Tripodi 2011). Unfortunately, the Khan of Qalat proved unable to subdue the Marri and Bugti tribes, who continued to raid the Indian territories of Punjab and Sindh. The Disraeli government wanted to put an end to these nuisances and cement British dominance in the region.
9. This arrangement supported the Disraeli government’s forward policy by helping to consolidate the British hold over Balochistan, facilitating the movement of British soldiers and material into Afghanistan, securing British access to the strategic Bolan Pass between Balochistan and Afghanistan, and permitting the British to occupy the town of Quetta, located some 400 kilometers beyond the formal frontier (Mahajan 2002). Serbia and Montenegro declared war on Turkey in the summer of 1876, and it appeared that Russia would enter the war on the side of Serbia. Disraeli considered opening up a Central Asian front against Russia, for which it would be necessary to have access to Afghanistan and, consequently, to and through Balochistan. Disraeli’s Balochistan policy was considered aggressive in some political circles (Mahajan 2002).
10. The Afghans reject the validity of the Durand Line, while Pakistan refuses to acknowledge Afghanistan’s position (Barfield 2007).
11. As Barfield (2012) notes, Abdur Rahman supported many of these armed groups in order to keep the British on edge. To give his ever more oppressive state political legitimacy in spite of his close alliance with the British, “he made defense of Islam and jihad a feature of Afghan national identity when dealing with the outside world. Abdur Rahman made himself the arbiter of domestic religious and notional ideology in a way that championed his primacy while hiding his compromises” (155).
12. These were the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909 and the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1920. The reforms moved toward ensuring constitutional rights and electoral participation for much—but not all—of the Raj.
13. In a personal communication, Thomas Barfield suggested that the British role in the Afghan Civil War of 1929 as well as their ultimate acceptance of Nadir Khan as king and provision of economic assistance and arms to his government may be an outlier. While the British did play a role in Afghan affairs at this time, their goal was not to govern Afghanistan directly but rather to ensure a friendly regime.
14. This is often referred to as Transoxiana because the Amu Darya was classically known as the Oxus River. This area lay between the Amu Darya (Oxus) in the south and the Syr Darya (in the north). It roughly corresponds to the modern-day territory encompassed by southwest Kazakhstan, southern Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
15. These claims, however, received no support from the international community: Britain insisted that all of the British–Afghanistan treaties remained binding as Pakistan was a lawful successor state (Haqqani 2005; Hus
sain 2005; Rubin 2002)
16. The most ardent proponent of this plan was Sardar Muhammad Daoud. Daoud was the cousin of Afghanistan’s King Zahir Shah and served as prime minister before ousting the king in a coup in 1973. He argued for an independent Pakhktunistan for Pakistan’s Pakhtuns who lived in NWFP (now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or KP), FATA, and Balochistan, but he never clarified what—if any—relations they would have with co-ethnics in Afghanistan.
17. While Pakistan was anxious to demonstrate that it faced various threats from the Soviet Union, it was also keen to play up its strategic utility to the United States in an attempt to receive more defense supplies—as the aforecited articles by M.A. Siddiqi make clear. In the late 1970s, Pakistan’s third military leader, General Zia ul Haq, again made this case to Washington. Pakistan–US defense ties had dwindled significantly following the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war, when Washington cut off military supplies to both combatants. (The United States was not enthusiastic about Zia’s coup and the subsequent execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.) In 1979 the United States even applied nuclear-proliferation-related sanctions, thus precluding any US security assistance to Pakistan without a waiver. As Pakistan was heavily dependent on US systems, the lack of access to US military goods affected Pakistan much more severely than it did India. The Jimmy Carter Administration was unmoved by Zia’s evocation of the threats from the Soviet Union and was in any case more concerned about developments in Iran, including the revolution and the US hostage crisis. But once the Russians crossed the Amu Darya (on Christmas Day 1979), the United States quickly shifted into gear, once again entering into a close relationship with Pakistan. While Zia was not able to get the massive assistance he sought from the Carter Administration, he was much more successful with Ronald Reagan, who oversaw a massive economic and security assistance program for Pakistan as a part of the efforts to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan. Of course, Pakistan had begun its own Afghanistan jihad strategy long before the Soviets formally invaded Afghanistan.
18. Ironically, after 9/11, the United States sought to use the Frontier Corps as a tool to fight the Taliban without understanding its historical role in training Islamist militants (author interviews with Department of Defense officials in 2008). The results of Washington’s efforts were mixed at best (Jones and Fair 2010).
19. Chishti, the commander of X Corps at the time of the coup, was responsible for the execution of Operation Fairplay, which overthrew Bhutto’s government.
20. The discord between Parcham and Khalq was due to the personal animus between Karmal and Taraki but also to the factions’ different approaches to reform. Parcham appreciated the lack of bureaucratic capacity to enact swift reforms and the need for gradualism. Khalq, in contrast, sought to immediately squash the existing order and banish the “backwardness of past centuries” within “the lifespan of one generation” (Maley 2002, 29; see also Magnus and Naby 2002, 118–128).
21. The delay was a result of the fact that, prior to the Soviet invasion, the United States had imposed sanctions on Pakistan for nuclear proliferation. President Carter was not persuaded of the need to change course, and even afterward he was not inclined to direct, via Pakistan, massive resources toward the jihad. But Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security advisor, argued that the invasion mandated “a review of our policy towards Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more aid, and alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our non-proliferation policy” (Sattar 2007, 159; see also Arif 1995). In 1980, without consulting Pakistan, Washington announced an aid package that provided $400 million in economic and military aid over 18 months. Zia rejected the package because it was “‘wrapped up in onerous conditions and these could affect Pakistan’s pursuit of the nuclear programme thus denuding (the offer) of relevance to our defensive capacity” (Sattar 2007, 159). But with Reagan’s election, US policy toward Pakistan changed. In April 1981, the United States approved a package with loans and grants totaling US$3 billion over five years (Sattar 2007).
22. The Pakistani state has made some important modifications to the FCR since 1947. Most notably, in 1999 the government extended some 365 federal laws to FATA. But the basic concept remains intact (Ali 1999).
23. From 1947 onward, the Muhajirs (people who had migrated to Pakistan from India) and Punjabis in West Pakistan tried to find some way to prevent the more numerous Bengalis of East Pakistan from reaching their true political strength. In March 1954, Governor Gen. Ghulam Mohammad dissolved the first Constituent Assembly just as it was about to come to some accommodation with the Bengalis over their demand that the Bengali language be granted official status. In an effort to offset the Bengalis’ numerical supremacy and superior political coherence, Mohammad promulgated the One Unit Scheme in March 1955. Under this system, all of West Pakistan (e.g., the provinces, tribal areas, and princely states) was aggregated into One Unit, West Pakistan, in opposition to East Bengal, which was renamed East Pakistan. In June 1955 a second Constituent Assembly was elected (indirectly, via legislative councils) according to this electoral division (Jaffrelot 2002b).
Chapter 6
1. There is some debate (Whitehead 2007) about whether or not the Indian government had a signed copy of the instrument of accession in New Delhi before it began airlifting troops.
2. For a startlingly stylized account of this resolution, see the official website of the Pakistan Mission to the United Nations, “Kashmir—The History.” This account emphasizes the need for the plebiscite but omits the previous two prior conditions that must be first met. While this account is selective, it is representative of how this issue is treated in Pakistani sources.
3. Notably, Operation Gibraltar was named after the early eighth-century battle led by Gen. Tariq Bin Ziyad (the Islamic conqueror of Visigoth Hispania), in which he established a beachhead at Gibraltar. Gibraltar is derived from the Arabic Jabel al Tariq (Rock of Tariq).
4. As Raghavan (2009) details, India’s military command believed that it was running low on war stocks and pressed civilian leadership to accept the ceasefire. We now know that India’s military command was incorrect and that India could have continued fighting for some time. Pakistan was supplied per American/North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) standards, which meant it had about six weeks of spares and munitions. As peacetime planners often underestimate wartime requirements, it is possible that Pakistan also was running low on war materiel after three weeks of fighting (Tim Hoyt comments on this draft, April 2013).
5. Cohen (2004), in contrast, estimates that Hindus were 15 percent of East Pakistan’s population, while Haqqani (2005) puts it at 12–20 percent.
6. This is in contrast to Hindi and Urdu, which are grammatically the same language. However, where the former uses a Sanskrit-based script, the latter employs a Perso-Arabic script. Over time, Hindi has increasingly drawn from the Sanskrit vocabulary and Urdu from Persian and Arabic.
7. The number of refugees is contested. Pakistan contends that there were around 3 million refugees, while Indian sources suggest 10 million (Gill 2003).
8. The report was classified until 2001, when a redacted version was published. Most scholars had assumed that the report was classified because it detailed the excesses of the army in East Pakistan, but in fact the report offers very few insights into these alleged atrocities. However, it paints a picture of Khan as an inebriated lothario and even lists the various military wives with whom he disported himself, giving their husbands’ names and ranks. The enormous number of officers he allegedly cuckolded is probable cause for the military’s insistence to keep the report classified. For example, the report notes that Khan not only “drank heavily and even to excess” but in addition was “far from being an austere man sexually. The number of women with whom he had illicit relations is unfortunately all too large” (Hamoodur Rehman Commission 2001, 122). It continues to lament that “even in the gravest hour of the country’s difficulties, his mind was not disturbed enough to make him deviate fro
m his usual course of debauchery” (123). The report dedicates an entire chapter to what it calls “The Moral Aspect,” in which it questions the integrity of numerous army officers. The most peculiar feature of this chapter is that it details the women with whom Khan had affairs and even includes two appendices of women who visited him in his homes in Karachi and Islamabad (296–312).
9. As described later in this chapter, Pakistan prefers this concept for two general reasons. First, this conventional posture and the eternal enmity toward India justifies the army’s size, inordinate privileged access to all of the state’s resources, and the arrogated right to intervene politically. Second, as detailed herein, Pakistan sees its various ethnic, sectarian, and socioeconomic fault lines as potential conflicts that become active conflicts due to Indian (or sometimes other external) intervention. Since the army identifies India as the root of Pakistan’s domestic insecurity, the army subordinates the country’s internal threat to the external threat. This partially explains why the Pakistan Army insists on using the concept of low-intensity conflict to combat internal insurgent and terrorist organizations rather than the population-centric counterinsurgency approaches championed—for better or for worse—by the American military in recent years. If the army were to embrace the concept of population-centric counterinsurgency, it would have to reimagine the nature of the domestic conflicts it confronts.
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